With the increasing desire to carry smaller and smaller personal communicating devices with optimum functionality such as pagers, cellular phones, and other personal communicator devices, and the desire to automate homes through combinations of telecommunications and cable where smart rooms will have one or more small devices that operate a variety of appliances or control a variety of applications; the need and desire to enter alphanumeric text through non-alpha or numeric keypad is ever increasing.
In the United States of America it is standard for every telephone keypad to have letters as well as numerals displayed on the keys. Thus, the key representing the numeral "2" has the letters A, B and C displayed and the key representing the numeral "3" has the letters D, E and F etc. It is common to represent a telephone number by the letters which correspond to the digits on the keypad.
Various approaches for entering alphanumeric input through a non-alpha, numeric only, or other type of keypad having fewer keys or buttons than the corresponding alphabet have been developed or are known. Many of these methods take advantage of the letters displayed on the standard US telephone keypad. However, often the methods associated with the alphanumeric text through the keypad are cumbersome and difficult to edit. In addition, typically the entry must be restricted or entered in a specific manner such that there is only one option per sequence of input. More specifically, there is a direct correlation for a specific input to a specific letter of the alphabet or a symbol. For example, if a user wants to input the word "call" through a non-alpha keyboard, the user has to enter a specific combination of numbers and/or symbols to indicate the word "call". By way of example, for a user to enter the word "call" the user must enter the following: 2***; 2*; 5***; 5***; #. Such a method of inputting is very restrictive, time consuming, and editing is difficult and slow.
The above described methods of data entry do not readily apply themselves to the Chinese language. There are several thousand characters in the Chinese language. For example, there are nearly 7000 Chinese characters supported by the GB coding standard used in China, and about 13000 Chinese characters supported by the Big5 coding standard used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is a major challenge to build a device that can select characters from such a large dictionary using a small number of keys, for example just 12 keys of an electronic keypad.
Therefore a need exists to provide a user with a simple straightforward method and apparatus for inputting text through a keypad having fewer keys than the desired alphabet; and the need exists to provide such a system without resort to massive computational power or memory demand.
A preferred embodiment of the invention are now described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings.